One reader's reconciliation of habit with passion & pleasure with self-actualization

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Bellwether by Connie Willis (1996)

"Poincare had believed creative thought was a process of inducing inner chaos to achieve a higher level of equilibrium" or self-organized criticality, as we learned earlier in the novel.

Diagram-Map-Story color coded for date vector and incidence is the solution our heroine stumbles upon while interacting with a recalcitrant child to find patterns in massive amounts of data.

The storyline reminds me of many of the themes W. Gibson has explored in his more recent novels. Willis has written a light novel (bit of romance, bit of humor) built on examining scientific theory, just the way my science illiterate brain likes to learn it. And I may try a diagram-map-story myself sometime.